Carrefour And Points Beyond

Today, we had our car delivered. It's a Peugot 407 sedan diesel that was previously driven by a heavy smoker. The car is a long term rental with full and complete insurance coverage and is provided for us by a local firm called NetCarTunisie.

DH and I decided we needed to try to find two things: Carrefour and the house we may be living in soon.

We loaded up in our smokey car, put Febreeze on our shopping list and cruised out to find Carrefour. From where we are staying at Hotel Les Berge du Lac - Concorde, the Carrefour is about halfway to the house. So, Carrefour first, then try to find the house by ourselves.

One of our tasks at Carrefour was to return a small piece of equipment that we purchased that won't work in the hotel room. It was a low priced network cable splitter that would have made it so DH and I could both surf the web at once--but no joy. The plan was to return it and then do our shopping. When you don't know the French words for 'service desk' or 'return item' this could become an adventure. The retail experience was just as you would expect. We went to three different desks and stood in line behind multiple other irate shoppers before we came upon the actual service desk. Once we got it across that the item didn't work, we got sent back to the first desk, where the actual refund was processed. So, success. Hard fought, but successful.

Next we trolled through the store with our shopping list in hand. First, I wanted to show you something that I alluded to in a previous post... that is the size of tuna cans in this area.

This shot represents one third of the actual shelves with canned fish on them. There is an equal number of canned salmon, sardines and anchovies. It's the most canned fish I've ever seen in a single store. But check out the size of the tuna cans. I tried to get a few of them. They are the size of paint cans.

There was also something on the household goods aisles that I felt the need to document for you. For some reason that remains a mystery to me, they have pans that are decorated on the outside. On the side that will get burned. I've seen pans that were a solid color, but these are really decorative.

In case you didn't really get a load of this, one of the decorative patterns is faded blue jeans. With pockets. I'm not sure how I feel about pans that look like blue jeans. Are they for relaxed, laid back meals? Will you feel better preparing comfort foods in a 'broken in jeans' frying pan?

Hey, I'm all about having a color coordinated kitchen stuff. But for some reason, this just seems tacky to me. It's probably because, as a newlywed, I had a set of golden yellow pans that I burned all the paint off of. Colored paint on the outside of cheap cookware brings up special memories for me.

Once we got through Carrefour, we set out in the other direction to find our new (we hope) home. I've been there twice, and I thought I could find it again. So we took off and with only a single wrong turn, we found the house. It's still not done. I'm sure the landlord needs the lease money to complete his projects.

We have high hopes of being able to settle in before the end of the year. But for now, having wheels will make it a little easier to do our sightseeing.

--Sandee Wagner